


Saya's Really Expensive Shoes

by darkpenn



Category: Highschool of the Dead
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-09
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:32:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkpenn/pseuds/darkpenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a shopping trip with Hirano, Saya finds more than she bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saya's Really Expensive Shoes

[Author’s Note: This short story is meant to be read as an incidental part of the story cycle The Chronicle of Takeshi Komuro rather than as a component of the main narrative stream. It takes place while the group is in the city, at the mall; that is, within the time period of the story Dead and the City. Specifically, it takes place shortly before Saya gets into Hirano’s sleeping bag.]

“I don’t know if this is such a good idea, Saya,” said Hirano.  
“Of course it is, since I thought of it,” said Saya. “This might be my last chance for some serious retail before we leave the city. Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any of them around.”  
“Still, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be wandering around by ourselves, without telling the others where we were going.”  
“Oh, I told Takashi we were going to look for more gas cylinders for the stove.”  
“And yet here we are in the boutique district.” He looked around. Designer shops as far as the eye could see. At least the area was relatively untouched, by the look of things. Some other parts of the city were not much more than ruin and rubble.   
He sighed. He did not really know why he was here, but on the other hand he would go with Saya pretty well anywhere that she wanted to go. He hefted the automatic rifle that he had liberated from the abandoned police station near the mall.  
“Versace,” read Saya, as they walked down the street. “Gucci. Prada.”  
“Those are people, right?” said Hirano.  
She stared at him. “You really are hyper-challenged in normal things, aren’t you?” she said.  
“No! Well, sometimes. Yes, I suppose I am. Are we looking for anything in particular?”  
“Yes, and here it is. Welcome to paradise.”  
It was a shoe store. An extremely expensive shoe store.  
“This is absolutely wonderful!” said Saya as they went in. “I have the whole place to myself. Oh, these are really cute.” She took a pair of turquoise pumps from the display case. She sat down and tried them on. Then she looked at the price tag. “Humph,” she said.  
“What, too expensive?” said Hirano.  
“Not expensive enough,” said Saya.  
“Huh?”  
“You really don’t get it, do you?”  
“Obviously not.”  
She tried on another pair. And another. And another. And so on.  
“You know,” said Hirano. “None of these are very practical in our current circumstances. A solid pair of boots would be better. You really need something you can run in. As in, away from zombies.”  
“Jimmy Choos?”  
“Can you run in them?”  
“Not really. You know, this whole shopping thing was much more fun when there were lots of salespeople around to suck up to you. Serving champagne and stuff. What do you think of these?”  
“They’re lovely.”  
“And what about these ones?”  
“Also lovely.”  
“And these?”  
“Yes, lovely.”  
“You really don’t know, do you?”  
“No. On the other hand, do you care anything at all about my opinion?”  
“Of course not. I was just being polite. Although why, I don’t know.”  
Then she saw them. Manblo Blahnik. Three-inch heels. Hand-tooled. Red as a ruby on fire. With a charming little strap. “Oh god,” she said, reverentially taking them out of the cabinet.  
“I don’t see a price tag on them,” said Hirano.  
“If you have to look at the price, you can’t afford them,” said Saya. She put them on. “Trust me, these are ludicrously, amazingly, outlandishly expensive. Oh, these will impress everyone.”  
“Uh, there might be only seven people left in the world,” said Hirano. “I doubt Saeko would care, she doesn’t strike me as a shoe person. Alice is only eight or so. And I would be impressed with you if you were naked. Er, I mean, if your feet were naked. Bare. If you had bare feet, I mean. Wearing nothing … on your feet.”  
She stared at him. “Three point seven billion men in the world and you happen to be one of the last two,” she muttered. “How come you survived when all those really cute boys on the football team got killed?”  
“Because I … uh, do you hear something?”  
From the street, just outside the store, there came a low moaning. Zombies. They began to pound on the glass windows.  
“Run!” said Hirano. “That way, into the back!”  
They ran into the back of the store. They heard the glass give way.  
“Good thing we both have guns,” said Hirano. He looked around: they were in a small store-room. He closed the door, but it was not much more than a plywood partition and would not last long when the zombies went to work on it.  
“Uh, about that,” said Saya. “I … don’t.”  
“What!? You didn’t come prepared for this?”  
“I thought we were going shopping for shoes! I didn’t think zombies liked shoes! Anyway, you’ve got a gun. You can shoot them.”  
“There’s a lot of them.”  
“But you have a lot of bullets, don’t you?”  
“Er … well, just the one clip.”  
“Huh. Didn’t come prepared, eh?”  
“Okay, so the moral of the story is that you should always carry your Luger and I should always carry extra clips. There has to be another way out.”   
There was no other door to the room. They could hear the zombies shuffling about in the next room, looking for them. They would find them before long.  
Hirano turned to the wall at the back. It was plasterboard.  
“Through here,” he said.  
“That’s a wall,” said Saya.  
“Yes, but I can shoot a hole in it. Enough to weaken it, anyway. Of course, as soon as I do the zombies will hear it and come pouring in.”  
At that moment, a zombie began to bang on the door to the storeroom.  
“Do it,” said Saya.  
Hirano took aim and then fired a burst, vertically up the wall. There was a shower of plaster.  
A zombie hand came smashing through the door.  
Hirano ran at the wall. He crashed through, landing in a heap on the other side.  
Saya stepped through the hole, trying to avoid the plaster and dust swirling through the air.  
“Well, don’t just lie there,” she said. “We should be moving along.”  
Hirano got up. They were in a hallway. There was a door at the end. They went through it, and found themselves in the alley that ran behind the store.  
Hirano ran to the corner and peered around it, into the street. Then he realised that Saya was not next to him. He looked back; she was still coming along the alley. She couldn’t run in the Manblo Blahnik shoes. She had left her other shoes in the store, which was now infested with zombies.  
“Take those damn things off!” he said.  
“No,” she said. “They’re really nice, and really expensive, and I’m not leaving them behind.”  
“You really think they’re worth dying for?”  
“Hmm,” she said, thinking about it. “Hmm.”  
“Look, here’s our situation,” he said. “There’s zombies on the street, zombies over there and there, and zombies coming up behind us. That’s a lot of zombies.”  
Saya looked around. “So here’s what we do,” she said. “We go into that Dolce store across the street, the two-storey one. There’s a fire escape at the side, leading to that laneway over there, you see it? That laneway leads away from the street, so there probably won’t be any zombies there.”  
Hirano nodded. “Yeah, that might work,” he said. “Very good tactics.”  
“Well, I am a genius,” said Saya.  
“But we still need to get across the road. That means running pretty fast.”  
Saya sighed. Reluctantly, she took off the shoes. “Okay, I guess I can carry them for a while,” she said.   
The zombies were starting to come through the hole in the wall and into the alley.  
“We’ll go together,” he said. “Get ready – ”  
“Wait a second,” she said.  
“What is it!?” he said.  
She grabbed him by the shirt, pulled him to her, and kissed him. “For luck,” she said.  
He was a bit dazed. “Uh, yeah, right, for luck,” he said.  
Then he just stood there, looking at her.   
“What, you’ve never been kissed before?” she said.  
“No, not really,” he said.  
She rolled her eyes. “Well, we should go,” she said. “And, you know, avoid the zombies.”  
“Oh, right. The zombies.”  
They ran for the Dolce store.  
The zombies in the street immediately heard them and started after them, but they made it to the store. They closed the door behind them and pushed a cabinet up against it.  
Then they looked around. There were four zombies in the store with them. They were all wearing tags saying D&G.  
“Oh, they work here,” said Saya. “Or they did, when they were alive, at least.”  
Hirano unslung his automatic rifle and fired. Three of them went down. Then the gun clicked on empty.  
Hirano took it by the barrel and swung it but the last zombie caught it and wrenched it out of his hands.  
“Uh-oh,” said Saya. “That can’t be good.”  
The zombie heard, and started for her.  
“No!” shouted Hirano. “Over here!” he ran to the other side of the store and banged on a cabinet. “Here, over here!”  
The zombie turned away from Saya and began to advance on Hirano.  
“Saya, run!” called Hirano. “Go, you can make it!”  
Now Hirano was cornered and defenceless. The zombie reached out for him.  
“Hey, moron,” said Saya from behind the zombie. It turned again – and Hirano saw Saya hit it with something. It fell backwards, dead.  
One of the Manblo Blahnik shoes was on the zombie’s face, the stiletto heel in its eye.  
“Wow,” said Hirano. “Death by fashion item. Pretty cool.” He bent over to extract the shoe from the zombie.  
“Uh, I don’t think I want it now,” said Saya. She tossed the other one onto the zombie. “Hirano, you were going to sacrifice yourself for me.”  
“Well, er … ” He turned red. “And you sacrificed your really expensive shoes for me,” he said.  
They looked at each other for a long moment.   
Zombies were starting to hammer on the door.  
They found a staircase at the back of the store and ran up to the second storey, and then to the window which led onto the fire escape. They went down the metal ladder to the laneway – and then stopped.  
The laneway was covered in broken glass.  
Without a word, Hirano swept Saya into his arms.  
“Oh my,” she said, putting her arm around his neck. “You’re stronger than you look.”  
He carried her until there was no more glass. By the time he put her down, there were no zombies in sight.  
When they entered the group’s camp at the mall, they saw Takashi. “Did you find any gas cylinders?” he said to Saya.  
“No,” she said. “But I think that maybe I found something more important.”

END


End file.
